Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1441485
76 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2022 Shaughnessy: What advice would you give any young designers and design engineers who are coming into the industry? If they're trying to learn more about material properties and high- speed design, what would you say to them? Amla: Try to get into other disciplines. If you want to be successful, learn what the other guy is doing, because that's going to be very impor- tant for you. Don't just stay in your silo and say, "I'm going to just do this because I'm an elec- trical engineer. I don't want to find out what all these other parameters are and what other dis- ciplines are involved." e advantage an engi- neer has, and I'm not trying to disparage any other discipline, is that you have the ability, the same basic toolset. If you know transform- ers, you know gears, right? Because these are analogous systems. Learn as much as possible. Apply the same engineering principles to different problems, and it's not that hard; it's basically very straight- forward. And once you do that, your value is going to increase, because now you under- stand the other aspects. So, this has been my mantra all along: learn what the other guy is doing, and be as curious as possible to under- stand how, because it's all physics. So, it doesn't mean that the electrical engineering principles of physics are different from mechanical engi- neering principles. e underlying math is the same, just applied to different problems. Ritchey: Because we're pushing everything so hard, you need to understand how your stuff is manufactured so you don't ask for something that can't be built. at's what we're having right now with these stacked microvias—the homework wasn't done ahead of time before they launched a product plan. And if they had done that, they would not have stacked three high, so now we are in a position of having to figure out how to deal with the materials prob- lem. I've always spent about half of my time on the manufacturing side of things. I can't even list how many fab shops I visited around the world, and I still do. I want to know where the limits are and how hard I can push. Anybody who's designing a product has got to know how manufacturing works. Matties: Yes. I'm still a believer that at some point AI is coming into this equation of design in a much stronger way. And we know that there's a race to it with the tool makers. Ritchey: Now, that always reminds me of some- thing that Gene Amdahl told the audience way back when, and it applies right now. Amdahl was the first maker of computers that success- fully competed against IBM, and it was an all-integrated circuit product that was higher performance than anything IBM had. At the press conference, a reporter asked, "Aren't you afraid you're making computers so fast that they'll replace thinking?" Gene replied, "Ma'am, what you don't seem to understand is that what we have made here is an exceedingly fast idiot." And that's what AI is. Matties: Well, if you must understand manufac- turing, you must understand all these things. AI is not going to displace the human; it's going to change the way that the human inter- faces with the tool. e work that the tool is doing for you doesn't mean that the human is out of the equation. Ritchey: No. But the human made the AI and it's only going to be as good as the human that made it. If you want to be success- ful, learn what the other guy is doing, because that's going to be very important for you.